Paralyzed man with “no hope” for recovery unable to speak while doctors ask family about donating his organs
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By Dave Andrusko
Jim Fritze’s grief-stricken relatives came to Sahlgrenska Hospital to say their final goodbyes. Doctors said brains scans showed that the 43-year-old Fritze had “no hope” of pulling through.
“Doctors asked the family about the possibility of donating his organs when he died,” reported The Daily Mail’s Sara Malm, “not realising Mr. Fritze could also hear the conversation.”
The victim of a stroke, Fritze was unable to talk while the people surrounding his bed were discussing taking his organs!
He was saved because another doctor took a second look.
Malm reports that Fritze had suffered a brain hemorrhage two years before when out with his family. “’I managed to catch my girlfriend’s attention – I was bright red in the face, and she’s a nurse so she managed to keep my airways open,” he told Malm.
Unfortunately, because an air ambulance was unable to land on the Island where he had suffered his stroke, Fritze did not reach the Swedish hospital, by boat, for two hours.
“Only my ears and eyes were working,” Fritze said. “They (the doctors) told my girlfriend that there was no hope.”
Fortunately another doctor, who had returned from a holiday, looked at him three days later. “’She looked at my scans and said, ‘This doesn’t look too bad,’ and told the staff to give me cortisone to bring down the swelling in my brain,’” Fritze said.
But he was still unable to speak—that would take another three weeks. Now, two years later, he has recovered enough to take action against the hospital.
“If that doctor hadn’t come back from her holiday, would I have been made to lie there until my body couldn’t take it any longer?” Fritze asked in his complaint.
Sahlgrenska Hospital’s press spokesperson Stefan Sarajärvi said, ‘We are of course taking this complaint very seriously, as we do with all complaints.”
Fritze is now undergoing rehabilitation at Örebro hospital to regain full function in his limbs.
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